Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Four
It took him nine days to be fit to ride.
He said nothing about it to anybody, and there was nobody to say it to; he went out very little; and on the fourth morning his man, who had been with him eleven years and had the sense to be silent, brought his coffee and observed that it was very raw weather for December, and that a gentleman who had lately been in a damp county might do worse than sit in this week.
"Yes," said Darcy. "Thank you, Hobbs."
He sat in that week.
The thing recovers as an ordinary strength recovers, which is to say slowly, and unevenly, and with the particular humiliation that nothing whatever can be done to hurry it.
He knew the arithmetic better than most men, having been taught it at fourteen by a father who believed that a boy who would one day hold Pemberley should be told the price of everything before he was old enough to want to spend it.
A great ward, well laid, out of a strong line: three weeks.
A great ward taken up again, from the same line, on the ninth day after: that has no figure in any book, because no sane man does it, and the answer turned out to be nine days on a sopha in Grosvenor-street reading the same page of Coke upon Littleton eleven times.
He would have paid it again. That was not in question and had not been at any point.
What occupied him, in the nine days, was a different sum, which he did over and over with the discipline of a man determined not to arrive at the answer he wanted: that he had spent the whole of Pemberley's advantage on a ballroom in Hertfordshire, and had done it in nine seconds, and that if anyone had asked him at the time to justify it he could not have said anything more respectable than because a fool was standing up with her and the room was beginning to look at them.
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Georgiana was at the house in town with Mrs. Annesley.
She came into the room when he arrived, and stopped, and then came the rest of the way and was embraced; and she asked after his journey and whether the roads had been bad, and hoped that he had not taken cold, and sat down opposite him with her hands in her lap.
She was sixteen and a half. She was very tall now, and would be handsome in about two years, and there was a great deal of their mother in the shape of her face.
"You are thin," she said.
"I have been in Hertfordshire, where the cook is indifferent."
"Fitzwilliam."
"I am perfectly well, Georgiana."
She looked at him for a moment with an expression that he found, as he always found it, entirely intolerable: not doubt, and not reproach, but a kind of careful watching — the look of a person checking whether it is safe to believe a thing, in a house where she had once believed something and been wrong.
Then she said, "Shall I play?" which is what she said when she wished to stop a conversation, and he said yes, which is what he said when he wished to let her.
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She had been a child who could hold a room.
It was not remarkable in a family such as theirs; there are perhaps forty houses in England where such a thing turns up in a generation, and it is generally in music or in horses.
It had been in music with Georgiana since she was five.
She had sat down at the instrument at seven years old in a room containing thirty people and their aunt Fitzwilliam's dinner party had stopped talking within a bar and a half — not politely, not by an effort of manners, but the way people stop talking when a window blows open — and old Lady Metcalfe had cried into her glove, and been perfectly unable to say why, and been rather cross about it afterwards.
That was nine years ago.
She played now for twenty minutes: a Clementi, and then some Scotch airs because she knew he liked them, and she played beautifully.
Her fingering was very fine. Her time was exact.
Mrs. Annesley, who had heard a great many young ladies play, listened with real pleasure and turned the pages at the right moments.
And the room stayed a room.
It had been so since the autumn before last. Nobody outside the family knew it; nobody inside it had ever said it aloud; and Miss Bingley continued to describe Miss Darcy's performance as exquisite, which it was, and to marvel at her accomplishment, which was now the correct word for it in every particular, and which had not been the correct word for it before Ramsgate.
Darcy sat and listened to his sister be accomplished.
He thought — and he was not proud of the thought and could not prevent it — of a young woman in a drawing-room in Hertfordshire, with a book in her lap, saying: do you mean that she has done anything at all?
Or only that she was born with a thing that cannot be got, and has since been taught to bring it into a drawing-room and set it down where the light falls on it?
He had told her he had nothing to answer to it that night.
He had had nothing to answer to it any night since.
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The thing itself had taken about four minutes, in a lodging-house at Ramsgate in the August before last, and it had been going on for six weeks before that.
He had all the particulars now. He had had them within a day, from Mrs. Younge's own mouth, delivered with the composure of a woman who considered herself to have been the wronged party in the business; and he had gone through them since, in the small hours, more times than was of any use to anybody.
The essentials were these. Wickham had been at Ramsgate.
He had been introduced by Mrs. Younge, whose acquaintance with him went back some years and was of a nature the world has an old word for.
He had been kind to a lonely girl of fifteen who had lost her father four years before and had a brother twelve years older whom she loved and could not talk to.
He had been ungloved, always, at every meeting, for six weeks — which Darcy had established afterwards by asking her, twice, in a way that he was still ashamed of.
And on the last morning he had persuaded her to consent to an elopement, and she had consented, and had then — because she was fifteen and had never in her life kept anything from her brother for longer than a day — written to Darcy; and Darcy had come; and Wickham had gone within the hour with no scene at all, in a manner Darcy afterwards recognized as professional.
She had lost about nine-tenths of what she had.
There is no examination for it, and no physician in London who would not have thought them mad, and no word for it either; and the way they knew was that she sat down at the instrument on the third evening after and played the same piece she had played on the day their father died, and their aunt's housekeeper went on stacking plates in the next room.
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The oath had come four days later.
He had never intended it. He had gone into her room at eleven at night because he had heard her crying through a door, and had sat down on the chair by the bed, and had been intending to say a number of very reasonable things — that she was not to blame, that she was fifteen, that no one would ever know — and had got as far as the last of them.
No one will ever know.
And Georgiana had sat up in the dark and taken hold of his sleeve with both hands and said, "Swear it."
He had said, "Georgiana—"
"Swear it, Fitzwilliam. Not — not that you will not tell people, I know you will not tell people, everybody says that. Swear it properly." Her voice had gone up. "You do it for tenants. I have seen you do it in the office for a man about a boundary. Do it for me."
And she had been shaking so hard that she had not been able to hold the pen when they came to it, and he had steadied her hand, which is permitted, and it had taken; and he had felt it take, in the way one feels a door shut in a house at night — not loud, entirely final.
He had thought at the time that he was giving her the only thing he had left to give.
He had not thought at all — he had been nine-and-twenty and frightened and it had genuinely not entered his head — that there might come a day when the man was standing in a road in Hertfordshire being introduced to five sisters, of whom the youngest was fifteen years old.
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Mr. Tarrant's answer had been waiting for him at Grosvenor-street, having been three weeks in coming.
It was four sides, in a very bad hand, from a gentleman of the Society of Antiquaries who had not written to Darcy since a disagreement about a Roman pavement in 1807, and who had plainly enjoyed the inquiry a great deal.
The substance of it was short, and Darcy read it three times.
Sir, — You ask what bargains were made in Hertfordshire and by whom. The answer, which will not satisfy you, is none.
I have gone to the Rolls and to Chichele's list and to the two Winchester books.
Every county south and east of the Trent is in them: what was given, what was taken, which houses, which waters, which stones.
There are four hundred and eleven entries.
Hertfordshire has none. It is not that the entries are lost. There is no gap where they should be; the clerks did not leave a space; the county is simply not among the counties.
Now, sir, the common opinion is that this signifies nothing more than that the courts found the ground unremarkable and passed it over — and I have myself written this in print, and you may find it in the Archaeologia for 1794, and I am now of a different mind and too old to care who knows it.
For I would put it to you that in four hundred years the wards of that county have never once been renewed, which is a fact you may verify at any parish in it in an afternoon, and which no man of sense will do because there is nothing there to alarm anybody.
And I would ask you what holds up a thing that no one has ever mended.
You are in a county that was not bargained for. Something has kept it quiet notwithstanding. I do not know what, and I would very much like to, and if you are able to tell me what the grass is doing I shall be obliged to you and shall probably not sleep.
Do not go into any low ground there after dark. I am, and Darcy sat with his hands on the arms of the chair and listened to his friend construct, in the most artless manner imaginable, the case for going back.
And then Miss Bingley came, and Mrs. Hurst, and the thing was done between the three of them in about forty minutes, and Darcy — this was the part he went over afterwards, for four months, and could never get to come out differently — Darcy said the two things he believed, and did not say the third.
He said that he had observed Miss Bennet closely, on many occasions, in company, and that though she received his friend's attentions with pleasure, he had never at any time seen in her the smallest symptom of peculiar regard.
That was true. He had seen her on the Thursday of the ball, and on the two Sundays before it, and at Longbourn, and at the dinner at the Philipses; and on every one of those occasions Jane Bennet had been serene, and glad, and precisely as glad of Charles as she was of everybody else in the room.
He had not seen her on the Tuesday of the week she was ill, when she had been too spent to hide anything, and Charles had sat by her for three hours and been the happiest man in Hertfordshire.
He had been in the ballroom that evening, on the far side, doing something to a window bay.
He said, secondly, that the connections were what they were, and that the mother and the three younger sisters were what they were.
That was true also, and it was ungenerous, and he knew it was ungenerous while he was saying it, and said it because it was the argument that would work on Caroline and would therefore keep her in the room and on his side.
And he did not say: Charles, do not take that house again, and do not take a house within thirty miles of it, and do not let your sisters go into that county in the spring.
There is something under Barrett's ground and it is coming uphill at nine yards in the week and I have written to a man in London who tells me the county was never bargained for at all.
I laid the best ward of my life on your ballroom and I took it up again on the ninth night because a clergyman with a pocket-book was three figures from getting a girl of two-and-twenty acknowledged in front of the county, and there was no other way to stop it, and I then held that room with my own line until three in the morning, and I have been nine days getting up off a sopha.
He did not say it because he had promised Georgiana that no one would ever know what Wickham was, and half of it could not be explained without the other half; and because Charles would have gone back the next morning to see about it, being that sort of man; and because a gentleman of eight hundred years does not go about the drawing-rooms of London telling people that a county is unsafe on the evidence of the color of some grass.
Those were the reasons. He had them in order. He rehearsed them at intervals for four months and they got no better with keeping.
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Georgiana asked him, on the last night of the year, whether he had liked Hertfordshire.
"Not particularly," said Darcy.
"Charles says it is full of the pleasantest people in England."
"Charles says that of every county he has ever slept in."
She smiled, and turned over a page of her music, and said, without looking up, "Fitzwilliam, was there anybody there?"
He had a great many answers to that, of which the shortest was no, and he found that he could not produce a single one of them; and after a silence that went on some seconds too long he said that he thought the fire wanted making up, and got up and did it himself, and stood at the chimney-piece with his back to the room for rather a while.
Behind him his sister played four bars, and stopped, and did not begin again, and sat looking at the keys.
Neither of them said anything else about it, then or for a long time; but Miss Darcy went up that night in better spirits than she had gone up in eighteen months, having discovered, as sixteen-year-old sisters do, a piece of information that her brother would have given a good deal to keep, and having no one in the world to tell it to.